1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to structure preserving deformations in digital images.
2. Description of the Related Art
Creating meaningful deformations of digital shapes with respect to user interactions is a long-standing problem with its applications spanning numerous areas of computer graphics. In computer animation, shape deformation is used to create active characters. In geometry processing, shape deformation can be used to smooth and match geometric objects. Moreover, shape deformation is used in shape modeling to save human labor. So far, most of the research in shape deformation focuses on preserving high frequency signals such as shape details or articulated structures such as skeletons.
Besides shape details and articulated structures, many digital shapes possess rich global structures which relate different parts of the digital shapes. Representative structures include various symmetries, grid patterns and some shape structures such as line features. Usually, the human visual system is sensitive to these global structures.
Thus, it is important to preserve these structures for realistic editing of digital shapes. Moreover, symmetries are ubiquitous in our daily lives, and so from the perspective of modeling, it may be important to preserve symmetries. Despite the tremendous advances in detail-preserving and skeleton-driven editing, little work on has been done regarding structure preserving editing.